Technology fetishism in The Wandering Earth

ABSTRACT

My claim is that Frant Gwo’s film, The Wandering Earth (2019), fetishises technology and, in so doing, forces Western audiences of the film to face an otherwise outdated thematic motif of social togetherness or solidarity. That is, the exquisite onscreen rendering of advanced technological achievement (the construction of 10,000 Earth Engines designed to drive the planet to inhabit another solar system after the sun begins to rapidly deteriorate) acts as an aesthetic Trojan Horse. We in the West are seduced by the slick technological hardware showcased in the film; from there, however, the film forces us to ask if such advanced technology can be achieved outside of the profit-motive. The capable visual rendering of technological progress subtly masks a more subversive political message critiquing Western colonization of the planet. In the end, the film asserts China’s right to lead humanity past impending global disaster not simply (nor solely) by making the necessary hard technological leaps, but by mobilizing the necessary collective energy and will of the world’s colonized and oppressed.

KEYWORDS:

• Technology fetishism
• The Wandering Earth
• decolonization
• China
• the West
• film studies
• Chinese cinema
• David Harvey
• Mobo Gao
• Fredric Jameson

Technology fetishism and growth: a theoretical introduction

David Harvey, speaking and writing about the fourth footnote to Chapter 15 of Marx’s Capital (volume 1), makes much of an otherwise arcane addendum to the main text, which, in this chapter, deals with “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry,” and in which, incidentally, Marx focuses on the role of technology in and around its relationship to capitalism. If the agglomeration thus far of suspect theoretical names and terms (like “David Harvey,” “Marx,” and “capitalism”) is somewhat off-putting, let me say that the following analysis of The Wandering Earth (2019) seeks neither to uncover the fundamental class conflict embedded in either the film or the making of the film, nor does it purport to uncover any hidden political message of subversion calling for the violent overthrow of the status quo. Nonetheless, I am making the claim that the film does say something or gets us to think about something particularly novel, if not revolutionary, simply by detailing not the dialectical steps toward a revolutionary event but rather, the fallout after such an event. Beginning in medias res, that is, 30 years into The Wandering Earth Project (after the completion of the International Space Station Navigational Platform), the narrative is not interested in detailing how we got to a point in human history in which humankind’s technological know-how is capable of driving the planet to a new solar system. That is, when the film opens, humanity has already made the necessary technological advance. This film affords us opportunity to speculate, if we choose, what sort of political advance could possibly usher in the type of technological leap made here. Yet the film does not present an answer. We watch not to discover how such technological advance was achieved but to see if one already in existence is necessary and sufficient enough to save our souls. And the principal threat to our existence is not a lack of technological prowess, but the possible human (in)ability to sufficiently mobilize the energy, drive, will, and interests of a planet that has literally gone off course. The principal dramatic energy revolves not around jumping over technological hurdles; these can be cleared. The hurdles to clear more urgently are social in nature.

For instance, I would have liked to see the movie title (as it appears to me in translation) respect the speculative nature of the film — that is, as a project, so The Wandering Earth Project, which immediately betrays the open-endedness of the film and the speculative nature not of the genre itself, but of the inherent message of contingency latent in the film — i.e. the contingency of human affairs and/or nature, so as to force us to speculate if such a project is not necessarily technologically feasible or speculative (suppose, for instance, it is entirely) but socially speculative, which is to ask if such a gargantuan mobilization of human energy is itself the boldest speculative fantasy behind both the story and the film. How human and social energy is to be mobilized, say politically, to make the type of technological end-product we have before us is the speculative kernel eliciting feelings of awe and wonder. Yet the film provides no overt political or social prescriptions, other than hokey or cheesy appeals to family. Hence, we have no clear idea what sort of political arrangements have ushered in the revolutionary project underway at either film’s beginning or end. Why do we not feel gypped?

Or perhaps we do. This particular angst, of showcasing X without detailing steps to realizing it, can be likened, loosely, to that expressed by Marxists who laud Marx’s theoretical acumen but descry his inability to lay out concrete steps to said societal transformation. Yet Harvey offers a constructive answer as to why laying out such steps is impossible. Rather than suggest Marx is being deliberately cryptic, Harvey notes that Marx gives as good an answer as he possibly can toward formulating a concrete revolutionary mandate in footnote 4 of Chapter 15.

Marx here [in this footnote] links in one sentence six identifiable conceptual elements. There is, first of all, technology. There is the relation to nature. There is the actual process of production and then, in rather shadowy form, the production and reproduction of daily life. There are social relations and mental conceptions. (Harvey 2010, 192)

Harvey suggests that all these elements are interrelated and work dialectically.¹ The idea of “uneven development” occurs as all elements progress, regress, stall, or stagnate at different speeds. What is necessary for a true revolution is not simply the advancement of any one of these elements within a given society (say, for the purposes of discussing this film, “technology”) but the simultaneous change and revolution across all moments. Yet because of the dialectical (rather than strictly linear or causal) relationship of each moment to the others, predicting how any revolution will occur or unfold is simply not feasible. “Uneven development between and among the elements produces contingency in human evolution (in much the same way that unpredictable mutations produce contingency in Darwinian theory)” (Harvey 2010, 196). If the struggle toward change requires a six-front offensive, I want to say that this film is radical or revolutionary in its attempt to document not the fictional realization of a certain technological advance, but in its progressive attempt to change both our mental conceptions and our understanding of contemporary lived social relations.

Since I have introduced the first-person plural (“our”), I want to define who exactly “we” are. As I am myself a Western consumer of the film and native speaker of English (with no ability to judge the inherent resonances the film’s dialog will have on Chinese [speaking] audiences), I am mostly speculating on the film’s ability to reveal Western aesthetic shortcomings. I am not saying the film is aware exactly of operating on the specific societal plane of “mental conceptions” I am claiming for it; I am saying the film deserves to be interpreted this way. Western audiences may find themselves placated by the exquisite and aesthetically pleasing rendering of technological advance this film affords, which provides an opportunity, then, for the film to challenge Western “mental conceptions,” though such new and novel conceptions are equally likely to be denied or repressed. What is likely to be missed is a speculative conception of the world not in which people of color are at the helm of astonishing technological prowess — this has certainly happened before.² Rather an understanding that in order for this situation to ever come about requires a reorienting of priorities — one in which social relations are prioritized over and above technology. In short, this movie speculates that only when an ethics of care complements technological advance can the planet move forward as it should; and this is a conceit that is emotionally cheesy.

One area of ideological overlap between Western perception of this film and what I assume to be part of the film's allure for Chinese audiences also is its fetishization of technology. This film gains much of its aesthetic resonance by its ability to exploit what Marx would call the fetishistic belief in a “technological fix” (Harvey 2010, 169), i.e. the idea that whatever problems we face are merely one technological innovation away from being solved. Furthermore, the logics Marx describes in Capital explain the inner-workings of a Western capitalist society. As we are now more than a generation beyond China’s “opening up” to foreign market forces, I don’t want to suggest too hastily that Marx’s critique of capitalism now applies to China. I do want to say however that technology fetishism has taken firm hold in the hearts and minds of the Chinese and this is rendered exquisitely in a film like The Wandering Earth. This rendering is, in effect, an aesthetic Trojan Horse for Western sensibilities. The Wandering Earth tells a story of technological achievement and unfolding (rather than discovery) not via the individual genius of a Steve Jobs or Mark Zuckerberg, but via collective solidarity. Via the careful and direct representation of hard technological achievement, the softer or cheesier motif of solidarity is hardened or crystallized. Western audiences are challenged to embrace themes of social togetherness. In this film, however tentative or speculative, solidarity works.

I will further suggest that the framing thus far of a Western audience against one more “Chinese” in nature, however crude, is necessary in order to get at the specific political (and radical) import of the film. As a grand work of speculative fiction (radically restructured and altered from Liu Cixin’s original short story, enough to be called a separate text in its own right), the film alters the nature of our ability to receive messages of social togetherness. What I am presenting here is a racialized reading of the film that seeks not to disclose some “migrant future” in which people of color are at the periphery but one in which they are humanity’s central participants.

[T]hese alternative speculative fictions, films, and other media forms work to release speculation from capitalism’s persistent instrumentalization of futurity. I hold up these works of speculative fiction by people of color not as antidotes in and of themselves to racialized global capitalism but as affecting experiments that, in the process of imagining another way of being in time, point to the limitations of the new world order’s ongoing drive toward modes of privatization and securitization. (Bahng 2018, 7)

Through the careful discussion of five texts, Aimee Bahng shows how “migrant futures” are imagined at the periphery of the neoliberal project; the mediating technologies she employs are financial in nature and equally speculative. And since the financial instruments of neoliberalism largely continue an imperialistic tradition of resource and wealth extraction (Bahng 2018, 19), the imagined futures Bahng highlights are an attempt at “decolonizing futurity” (9) by “cultivating extended practices of care and more inclusive notions of family and collective responsibility” (138). In Bahng’s commentary, it is not by participating or harnessing the speculative dreams of finance capital in which her characters find salvation. Rather, what these works propose is a “counterpoetics” (Bahng 2018, 8) to the statistical projections of future speculative economic growth. Transformation of social relations or mental conceptions is not at the forefront. Rather, meaningful social relations are carved out at the periphery. The speculations here are socially timid and in reaction to the dominant one of financialization at the center. “What would it mean to reconfigure that marginalization from European notions of progress, modernity, history, and futurity? What alternative futurities emerge from those living beyond the purview of statistical projection?” (Bahng 2018, 5–6) Bahng suggests that Westerners (here she is specifically discussing Europeans and Americans) have a monopoly on futurity. She is looking for subaltern narratives adjacent to the dominant neoliberal thoroughfare. What The Wandering Earth proposes instead is the subaltern itself taking up the center. Indeed the more bracing reading might be that the colored people of the world have a monopoly not over any life-saving technology, but the civilizational impetus to press forward a philosophy of care.

The opening juxtaposition of Western news broadcasts against a simple story of an extended family (namely a man, his father, his son, and his wife) offers viewers something quaint and familiar against the novel. The voice-over indeed flattens the initial alarm it seems imperative for the fictional news broadcasts (of desertification, urban sprawl, floods) to convey. What is quaint and familiar are the sensationalist news stories warning of rising natural disasters. What is new and, if allowed, refreshing, is the story of the breakup of an extended family as the man is set to depart planet Earth for a fifteen-year mission on an International Space Station, and his father, in lieu of a mother who is terminally ill (though we don’t know it yet), being entrusted to ensure the survival of his son’s only son. This opening sequence can be interpreted (by “us”) as a reactionary response to the destruction, decadence, and death left by the West in wake of its stewardship of the planet, to which those on the receiving end of such atrocities must respond and hence sacrifice; more subtly, however, I believe these sequences can be viewed as an inheritance of the global disasters which require a solution as of yet unimagined. What this film very boldly suggests or puts forward is China’s right to take the lead in affairs concerning all of humanity.

Notice further the film’s social relations revolve resolutely around family ties, both biological and extended. After the opening sequence, we jump seventeen years into the future to be presented with a young boy and a young girl who have designs on seeing the surface of the Earth. The boy wants to do for the girl what we might take any young Hollywood male to want to do for any corresponding young Hollywood female. The boy, who considers himself “a genius” at work in a laboratory, has a plan to rescue the girl from her dreary classroom lessons to make a stab at rebellion. The boy creates a diversion, effectively shutting down the projected scenic images lining school hallways, to get the girl out of class, then takes her by the hand to fetch the two thermal suits which they require to survive the harrowing temperatures at the surface of the Earth (in the vicinity of −84 degrees Celsius). Yet somewhere in these opening minutes we learn that the boy and the girl are not romantically involved. In fact, they are brother and sister. The Western motif, to show another of the opposite sex some whole new world, is if not abandoned, then significantly transformed.³

Moving on, the thermal suits have been commandeered, as contraband, by the boy, who strikes a deal with Yi in exchange for G3 inflatable escape devices (or “safety float buoys”⁴) — a technology, seemingly, that Liu Qi has been developing in the laboratory (Figure 1). Hence a veritable bartering of goods or technology transfer has occurred; an exchange via the money form does not take place.⁵ The fact that no money exchanges hands here may be less significant than foreshadowing the capability not of the thermal suits, but of the G3 inflatable escape devices which later serve to keep the plot motoring along. Yet the lack of money exchange in the film’s opening minutes coupled with the lack of a strictly romantic quest suggests two things. One, that the character motivations here are not of the same conventional romantic fare which, for whatever reason, animates the push to discovery in other cinematic arenas. And two, that in a system of economic exchange without money, technology is the only good worth trading and bartering in. What this reduces the narrative drive to, and what I am suggesting the movie is suggesting is that the force animating humankind’s drive to drive the Earth is something ultimately unrooted in any individual romantic quest or desire for profit. That technology’s worth as a social good is not mediated here by money immediately challenges our (Western) presuppositions about how or if technology can proliferate at all — i.e. is technological advancement possible without the profit motive? Moreover, without these two fundamental conventions or motivations at our disposal to propel the narrative forward (neither romantic nor commercial pursuits), how exactly are we to commit not only to the story’s unfolding, but, in a way, to its pre-folding? What we are forced to face, bald-facedly, is that yes of course technological advance is possible without the profit motive. But how?

Figure 1. The G3 inflatable buoy: a life-saving technology.

That it is far easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, a truism loosely credited to Fredric Jameson, speaks not to this film per se, but to our ability to receive it. Sci-fi tales of planetary collapse are abound; I would say the conventional impetus involves some manner of space exploration, read, colonization. Earth becomes uninhabitable, hence we must look elsewhere, whether to some wandering space station, the moon, Mars, or beyond. In this film, rather than abandon a dying planet or discovering another Earth, we must take this dying planet with us; it’s the only one we have because we are all in it together.

Elsewhere in the same article, Jameson (2003), commenting on volume one of Project on the City (edited by Chuihua et al. 2001) highlights “the prodigious building boom in China today” and touches on the interpretive dilemma/dichotomy at hand. However much one’s first impulse is to equate the rapid urbanization (with empty high rises to boot) of the city with unfettered capitalism, a possible counterreaction to original reactionary impulses is also implied.

[A]lmost nine thousand high rises built in Shanghai since 1992 — not so much in terms of some turn or return to capitalism, but rather in terms of Deng Xiaoping’s strategy to use capitalism to build a radically different society: infrared rather than red:

the concealment of Communist, red ideals … to save Utopia at a moment when it was being contested on all sides, when the world kept accumulating proofs of its ravages and miseries … infrared©, the ideology of reform, is a campaign to preempt the demise of Utopia, a project to conceal 19th century ideals within the realities of the 21st century.⁶

Communist red ideals have not been abandoned but rather hidden behind the façade of the skylines of late capitalism. The city so-conceived is not red, but “infrared.” Jameson goes on to reformulate the idea that the end of the world is easier to imagine than the end of capitalism because everywhere already the end of capitalism refashions the world in its already dead image. He calls such skylines “the attempt to imagine capitalism by way of imagining the end of the world” (Jameson 2003, 76) meaning roughly that the “perpetual renovation” (74) induced by gentrification is an attempt to render in the city the end of the world — one no longer tied to history of any kind, hence to a “History that we cannot imagine except as ending” (76). Gentrification disguises perpetual death as perpetual new.

What is easier to imagine? That all the technological triumphs concomitant with China’s rise are indicative of China moving through capitalism towards a societal goal of true Communism, taken by some (say in the West) as true Red, or in this case, “infrared” propaganda? Or that China has acquiesced on its revolutionary mandate and become capitalist, taken by others (say in China) as reactionary propaganda? In the former case, such a world (as presented in this movie) is a possible end to a world that is first and necessarily ravaged by capitalism (but how to get there?). In the latter case, no such technological world (as presented in this movie) is possible without the dynamics of capitalism (which then leads to what?). To some degree, we are at an impasse in imagining our way out of either scenario.

In the late stages of capitalism’s ever repetitive renewal, it becomes impossible to imagine a way out, except, as Jameson notes, through acts of imagination.

[H]ow to jumpstart the sense of history so that it begins again to transmit feeble signals of time, of otherness, of change, of Utopia. The problem to be solved is that of breaking out of the windless present of the postmodern back into real historical time, and a history made by human beings. I think this writing [in this volume] is a way of doing that or at least of trying to. Its science-fictionality derives from the secret method of this genre: which in the absence of a future focuses on a single baleful tendency, one that … itself becomes apocalyptic and explodes the world in which we are trapped into innumerable shards and atoms. The dystopian appearance is thus only the sharp edge inserted into the seamless Moebius strip of late capitalism, the punctum or perceptual obsession that sees one thread, any thread, through to its predictable end. (Jameson 2003, 76)

For Jameson, the goal is not to breathe new life into something already dead but to remind ourselves, continually, perpetually, that another world is possible. Altering our perception or reading of said skylines, as testament either to capitalism’s success (high rises) or socialism’s failure (empty high rises) takes us past the strictly allegorical. I mean, perhaps China’s high rises, empty or otherwise, tell neither the story of capitalism’s success nor socialism’s failure. On what basis then do we assess the merits and/or deficiencies of a certain mobilization of human energy? I believe The Wandering Earth provides occasion to visit this question. How to assess this film’s artistic merit as opposed to propagandistic intent (if any)? The film is rather dystopic rather than utopic, but rather hopeful, or say, utopic in its rendering of what is possible for human beings to achieve together collectively, though many would say the film is hopelessly and naïvely so. But the open-endedness of the film’s conclusion, tainted with a type of pessimism based on time alone (roughly the same time period in which Western history is recorded, i.e. 2500 years) means it can hardly be accused of being overtly hopeful or naïve. What the film reveals is that we are singularly and viciously restricted in imagining how technological advance might occur outside of capitalism. Science fiction is perhaps the genre best-suited to allow us to make this imaginative leap, to “jumpstart the sense of history.” Yet the question after that is not, then what? Rather, what before, or how did we, or how can we possibly, get here to do this?

More specifically, why is it so difficult to imagine achieving technological advancement outside or beyond the unfolding of global capitalism? — which is to pose a question about the precise nature of our human relationships to one another and to technology. We are prone to think that a society likely to make the sorts of technological advancements we are asked to imagine in this film is one governed not by filial relations first and foremost, but by the “coercive law[s] of competition” (Marx 1990, 436). These laws, noted by Marx, create a de facto system of social organization that is technologically dynamic leading to the somewhat ingrained assumption that when capitalism stalls or fails, all that is required is a technological “fix.” In such a scenario, technology has become “fetishised.”

In brief, the labor power saved due to a technological advance (the introduction of some form of machinery, whether of the electrical or, nowadays, AI variety) results only in a relative surplus value — relative, that is, to the time it takes all other producers to “catch up.” Once this happens, the surplus value generated for the time being (the ability to produce more widgets for a fraction of the labor cost) evaporates. Capital costs (including the new technology) become constant over time. In order to compete, all producers must eventually adopt the same technology. Therefore, over time, technological advance drives down the price of a good. Profits, in a sense, are equalized. So we are back to square one.

Note, however, that in this scenario profits don’t disappear. The rate of profit over time simply does not increase. In the long run, advances in technology do not result in absolute growth, i.e. an increase in the rate of absolute surplus value. Yet for a brief period, the capitalist harvests ephemeral relative surplus value (profit) due to a brief technological edge. The search then for short term growth creates an atmosphere of technological dynamism with short-term, rather than long-term, payoff. Advances in technology are fetishized not for any long-term benefit, but for ephemeral short-term gain.

Put another way: technology fetishism is bred of the idea of growth, and growth, fetishistically, is “good.” The push to achieve relative surplus value (in however small a time-frame) is what makes capitalism technologically dynamic; amongst equal competitors in the marketplace, a technological “fix,” however wrongheaded, is duly applied.

Zero growth signals serious problems. Japan hasn’t grown much at all in recent times, poor folk. But the growth in China has been spectacular, so the Chinese are the grand success story. How can we emulate them? We all happily sit around and say growth is good, technological change is good and so capitalism, which requires both, must also be good. (Harvey 2010, 201)

Now what I want to say is this film rather speculatively invites us to divorce the idea of technological advance from growth. When Harvey says “we,” he means if not America nor the West, then perhaps the rest of the world. The phrasing he uses reveals not the Chinese acceptance of technological fetishism, but the acceptance by us of their success via technological fetishism, achieved fictionally in the construction of 10,000 Earth engines worldwide (including the massive Torque engines at the equator) and suggested non-fictionally in the production of a seemingly high-budget, CGI-epic like The Wandering Earth. Taken together, we are forced in a way to accept China’s entry into a type of debate over the nature of value, i.e. where does it come from? — the continual push for technological advantage and relative surplus value? I believe the film is suggesting that the continual accumulation of short-term surplus value is preventing a type of mobilization of technological know-how necessary to save the planet.

Value comes from the social relations between people, not any technological advantage. Yet the path to appreciating this insight, even dealing with such a motif seriously, contradictorily, comes via the onscreen rendering of technology fetishism. The film, somewhat magically or mythically, attempts to delink technological advance from the exploitative accumulation of surplus value which leaves human beings in the lurch anyhow. A specific, perhaps conscious, change in social relations is required to marry technological dynamism to long-term social planning. We must value people first. This is the movie’s claim to being “infrared” cinema.

Yet value defined as the social relations between people is not particularly helpful in establishing any sort of calculus or measure of value, which Marx and most economists are more interested in doing. For the sake of some cost-benefit ratio, how indeed do we know when, say, a family member is to be sacrificed for the greater good or when, alternately, the push must be, first and foremost, to protect the sanctity and integrity of family bonds? To suggest that such decisions can be made based on apriori inputs is perhaps rather barbaric but when faced with a seemingly omnipotent computer operating system at the head of the Navigational Platform International Space Station, one cannot help but consider what type of calculus an operating system such as MOSS might employ.

To recap briefly, the moment Jupiter’s gravitational spike is detected, The Wandering Earth Project seems irreversibly derailed. Note the alarm behind MOSS’s deadpan assessment of destruction approximately 44 min into the film:

Warning. Earth Engine system failing. Total. 121 facilities. Correction. 1,112 facilities. Correction. 3,319 facilities … . Due to Jupiter’s gravitational spike, Earth’s propulsion have been halved. Torques lost completely. In 37 hours, 4 minutes, and 12 seconds, Earth will collide with Jupiter.

In a matter of seconds, 3319 of 10,000 Earth Engines are lost, and we know not when or if the carnage will or has stopped. In a matter of a few seconds, that is, it seems entirely likely that Earth will lose all 10,000 machines.

At this point, Liu Qi and Duoduo are being held in captivity at N3 supply depot in Jining, Shandong for the unregulated driving of a massive transporter vehicle, all of which are public property under the proprietorship of the United Earth Government. We quickly understand that the private operation of these gigantic public utility vehicles is a serious offence of which Han Ziang — Liu Qi and Duoduo’s grandfather — must attempt to bribe his way out. His ploy, of offering pin-up girls and booze to the security guard, misfires, and he is subsequently locked up with his granddaughter and grandson. Jupiter’s gravitational spike initiates the fracturing of Earth’s tectonic plates causing the sky to fall upon planet Earth’s underground cities, each of which is constructed adjacent to a corresponding Earth engine. Humanity has thus far been corralled, it seems, within 10,000 subterranean cities.

In face of humanity’s impending doom, the calculus of individual human survival versus family survival versus planetary survival makes the strict delineation of each a bit comical if not absurd. Where to begin? As the intense quake due to fracturing is underway, Liu Qi, Duoduo, and Han Ziang, along with Tim — a bi-racial Chinese-Australian who nonetheless possesses a Chinese heart (Zhongguo xin) — manage to flee captivity. Initially, Liu Qi does not consider freeing Tim, but as the three of them make their way up the stairs, Tim pleads to be rescued based not simply on an inalienable right to survival, but (comically of course) on filial relations. “Help! Is anyone there? My mom needs me and my kid. I don’t even have a kid yet! Hey! Please help me, man.” Liu Qi has a change of heart and returns to free Tim as well. The security guard, who made no such appeal (perhaps because he is unconscious or dead), is left to fend for himself.

The four of them reoccupy Transporter CN373 and are off. Transporter CN373 we later discover runs on a special operating system and is almost immediately tracked down and requisitioned by rescue unit CN171-11 headed by Captain Wang Lei. Unit CN171-11 is carrying out a UEG mandated global rescue sub-mission to restart Earth Engine 01 at Hangzhou (a major metropolis located in greater Shanghai). Han Ziang, his two grandchildren, and Tim, are all absorbed into sub-mission 1125. A 12-person team must work together to get an abandoned Lighter Core to Earth Engine 01. We understand similar rescue missions are happening worldwide under the aegis of the UEG’s Emergency Protocol No. 3; Earth has roughly 36 hours before it collides with Jupiter.

Earth’s atmospheric pressure suddenly drops and another quake destroys the transporter vehicle and its two escorts. One of the drivers is killed but the Lighter Core is unharmed. The team must now proceed on foot. The goal is to get a giant piece of technological sophistication, the only one remaining of its kind (meant specifically for the Earth Engine at Hangzhou) “up” somehow lacking veritable roadways and other traditional means of ascending from sea-level.

Captain Wang Lei:

Among all the Lighter Cores that were meant for Hangzhou, this is the last one. We’ve lost all our units. This Lighter Core is Hangzhou’s only hope.

Han Ziang:

Nice speech, but what about the two kids here?

Team CN171-11 splits up, with Captain Wang Lei, Chui Zi and Liu Zi making their way up to floor 79. Eight people remain below with the Lighter Core, including Liu Qi, Gang Zi, Zhou Qian (Ya Tou), Han Ziang, and Duoduo (along with three in silver suits — Tim, He Lianke, and Huang Ming). At floor 79, a portable anchor is attached to the bottom of an elevator car via four grappling hooks which pierce through the elevator car’s underside. Cables are tossed below from above to be fastened to the Lighter Core. The elevator car is the fulcrum for an ad hoc pulley system. With the help of a rotating motor, the Lighter Core is to be yanked up the elevator shaft.

As Gang Zi prepares the Lighter Core for transport, Liu Qi, oddly, intervenes. He says, “Hold on. Load people first.” Gang Zi hesitates and Liu Qi reiterates: “Load people first.” Following a radio injunction, Gang Zi seems to comply. People will be yanked up via cables first, with Captain Wang’s team doing the pulling; the Lighter Core, attached to the anchor, will follow. Priority established in terms of order descending from top to bottom follows thus: people then technology.

A cursory consideration of whether or not “putting people first” is indeed the wisest choice might reveal at least a primitive understanding that if we fail to put technology first at this juncture, then any subsequent favoring of people over technology will indeed be fruitless as whomever those people are, they will only have a maximum of 36 hours to live anyhow. The Lighter Core must make it to the top at all costs. Of course the pulley system is designed in this case for technology first. What is Liu Qi thinking?

Nonetheless, five of the eight (the two girls and the three in the silver suits) make it to floor 79 before the Lighter Core. We then catch a glimpse (via a long vertical pan) of Liu Qi, followed by his grandfather, followed by the Lighter Core. Gang Zi is still below seemingly content to crawl up the shaft after the fact via some sort of mechanical claw capable of gripping at concrete (presumably how Captain Wang Lei and his teammates scaled the tower in the first place) — after the fact, that is, of the Lighter Core making it safely to its destination.

But a mishap occurs. One of the four grips holding the anchor in place gives way. Liu Qi makes it to floor 79 and immediately implores Captain Wang Lei to “pull my grandfather up!” Liu Qi is placed in charge of pulling up his grandfather freeing up another (presumably stronger) body to pull at the Lighter Core.

Soon after, Gang Zi reports the Lighter Core’s position at floor 75, a mere four floors away. In light of a rapidly failing pulley system, the Lighter Core has managed to move ahead of Han Ziang. However, the entire anchor finally rips off the bottom of the elevator car; the Lighter Core plummets, narrowly ricocheting past Han Ziang. But because the elevator car remains in place, all is not lost.

The Lighter Core moves quickly up the shaft now and, remarkably, we see it move past Han Ziang a second time.⁷ Han Ziang and Gang Zi are the only two people remaining in the elevator shaft. Once the Lighter Core is delivered safely to floor 79, Liu Qi suddenly loses his footing but retains his grip on the cable suspending Han Ziang; it seems, rather than allowing his grandfather to perish, Liu Qi is willing to plummet to his demise with his grandfather. In a flash, Captain Wang Lei slashes the cable, sacrificing age for youth; Han Ziang is in freefall. Yet inside the elevator shaft an outstretched arm from Gang Zi, now scaling the wall, manages to catch the entirely slackened cable in the nick of time. Gang Zi holds Han Ziang’s life in his hand. Another tremor is heard; the elevator car finally gives way. Yet before it obliterates both of their lives, Gang Zi manages to kick open a latch and door and swing Han Ziang to safety. Gang Zi is subsequently crushed by the elevator car as it rushes down the shaft.

But hindsight proves the gesture, however well-meaning, to be meaningless. Han Ziang, though momentarily safe, simply freezes to death several minutes later. These extra minutes provide us with some valuable back story but by benefit of hindsight alone we are forced to ask, what was the point of Gang Zi’s seemingly heroic sacrifice?

Without getting too carried away with the specific calculi going on in anyone’s head, briefly, Liu Qi seems to favor people, Gang Zi favors technology, and Han Ziang favors youth. With these calculi in mind, the situation plays out a certain way; but I am not interested in suggesting that the way history unfolds accrues a certain validity to a specific calculus or set of calculi because history could have unfolded in any number of other ways none of which can be known in advance. So if the ostensible unfolding of events in the field is not enough to ratify any single position of value as superior to any other, how to proceed?

We might say at this point that whatever calculus one employs, human life is necessarily in the variable position. One cannot possibly think about sacrificing the Lighter Core. Its existence remains a type of constant (though Han Ziang is willing, however tentatively, to broach the subject, prioritizing youth over the existence of the planet [i.e. “Nice speech”] though perhaps to Han Ziang, youth is the existence of the planet).

After Han Ziang’s death, the dramatic stakes are raised considerably. Liu Qi, for instance, is no longer willing to continue nor remain at the surface. He forfeits on the mission and is willing to make his way back, presumably to the Jiaxing refuge center. Duoduo’s tears and answer to her brother’s exhortation (“Let’s go home,” translated as “Grandpa is gone. Where is our home?” [Ye ye bu zai. Women de jia zai nali?]), uttered in extreme desperation against the backdrop of an Earth deprived of the sun’s warmth and itself cut loose from its planetary fate — ventures in as high a pitch as this movie cares to a specter of nihilism.

Though the deaths of Han Ziang and Gang Zi are acknowledged as unfortunate, rescue team CN171-11 must carry on. Liu Qi, Duoduo, and Tim are given “backup supplies” and navigation capability; they depart (eventually tracking down another distress signal). Captain Wang Lei and his team must drag by cable the Lighter Core to its ultimate destination in Hangzhou. On foot, this journey is estimated to take another three hours. Yet as this is occurring, Zhou Qian is informed that Hangzhou city is destroyed; 350,000 lives have perished. Huang Ming can bear the cold no longer and drops dead.

Pause here to note that the restarting of Earth Engine 01, until this point in our imaginations I mean, has never been about saving the citizens of one single underground city. The imperative was to restart the Engine in a planetary-wide attempt to get planet Earth’s cross-galactic journey back on track. That some sort of moral trade-off arises suddenly between the fate of those in Hangzhou and the entire planetary population seems nonsensical. Huang Ming freezes to death and this trivial occurrence to a minor character is enough to move Zhou Qian to blast the Lighter Core to smithereens. Just prior to this, as if to soften the upcoming blow, we are warned by Zi Yi that restarting Earth Engine 01 is hardly worth the effort; the real task is to restart the more behemoth and significant pieces of technology (the Torque Engines) that line the Earth’s equator. Yet before we have a chance to fully digest let alone evaluate this new piece of information, the Lighter Core, the existence and survival of which has been the only dramatic constant we have had thus far to follow in the film, is violently and crudely destroyed via gunshots, akin perhaps to Lady Eboshi’s decapitation of the forest spirit in Princess Mononoke, or the narrator’s obliteration of the albatross in Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The act immediately elicits a response of complete incredulity: what was she thinking? The calculus we are likely to side with veers not toward humanity, but technology. Zhou Qian says: “No more death.” But the rebuttal by Captain Wang Lei expresses something of the possible reactionary angst we feel at Zhou Qian’s demented logic:

Yes, no more death. But Han Ziang, Gang Zi, Huang Ming, and all those lives of our rescue unit had died in vain. 3.5 billion lives on Earth. My wife and child! All died in vain!

Zhou Qian’s act is sacrilegious and strikes us as such. Note, however, that in the examples taken from elsewhere, what is severed or called into question is humankind’s relationship to nature. The sacrilege here concerns humankind’s relationship to a possible life-saving technology, hence a break away or apart from a different sort of savior.

Yet rather than face a world where we are no longer all watched over by machines of loving grace, the plot carries on by refastening our wants and desires immediately onto an even greater technological messiah. The goal immediately following Zhou Qian’s ludicrous act of transgression is to remobilize and reorient our bearings now to restart Torque Engine 03 at Sulawesi, Indonesia. Conveniently (comically, absurdly) enough, the Lighter Core necessary to complete this mission and save the planet is readily available in the newly rescued transporter. Hangzhou’s Lighter Core was a minor god; we are now invited to follow along to deliverance the journey of this new technological Titan. A competing technological imperative has removed us, gladly perhaps, from the difficult position of assessing subjective moral calculi pitting the deliverance of human beings against the deliverance of technology. For the continued time-being, hope still rests with technology. Captain Wang Lei has (albeit temporarily) been vindicated. Yet the backdrop of “people first” remains:

Liu Qi:

When this is over, I will settle with you for what happened to my grandpa.

If we are likely to feel defensive at such a retort, it’s because the sentiment raised once again by Liu Qi calls into question an otherwise seamless and even teleological unfolding that places technology first.

Decolonization: the wandering Earth as metaphor

Thus far I would like to recap some of the main points of argumentation of my paper and suggest that if I have managed to convince you that something of what I am getting at has actually occurred in the film, these points are much more discernible if one manages to read the film metaphorically. That is, the linear progression of events presents an opportunity to read the narrative of The Wandering Earth as allegorical, i.e. its unfolding as “put for” the narrative telling of something else. For instance, many Chinese stories gain fame and prominence in the West as de-facto “re-tellings” of some horror suffered under the Communist regime, usually the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution (Liu Cixin’s stories especially).⁸ Yet I want to say this film can be read metaphorically as something else — namely as expressing the relationship of the colonized peoples of the world to their colonizers — as expressing, that is, not the horror of the Great Leap Forward nor the Cultural Revolution, but the culmination of the far more harrowing five-hundred-year nightmare of Western imperialism (Figure 2).

Figure 2. The world must face the biggest threat to human survival together in solidarity.

The first point is that the film thematizes the possibility of human technological advance outside of the profit motive without detailing how exactly this is to occur. It instead hypothesizes that the achievement of a change in social relations is required to get humanity to a place, technological or otherwise, where it can begin to address problems of cataclysmic planetary consequence. Second, the film asserts China’s right to take the lead in this altering of social relations — which is an attempt, in the boldest possible sense, to change our “mental conceptions” of the world. Third, the film juxtaposes a calculus of “technology first” — as if only a “technological fix” can get us out of this or any disaster of such magnitude — against one that is “people first.” And putting people first in a world that is technologically dynamic may be a feat as difficult as driving the planet to inhabit another solar system; in this way are we all colonized not by the Western stewards of global capitalism per se, but by the concomitant logic of an imperial system that fetishizes technology and growth.

Since I have discussed the first point in some detail, I will proceed by further detailing the third before concluding with the second. That is, I want to say something about the reappearance of competing logics or calculi (I use these terms interchangeably) before concluding with a discussion of how exactly our “mental conceptions” are being challenged by The Wandering Earth. I mentioned that the film sustains an interpretation which I believe to be “metaphorical” rather than strictly “allegorical,” or perhaps I mean “typological.” That is, the reading of an event noted earlier (Zhou Qian’s deranged act of transgression) reappears or shows itself to occur again later in the film, so that one event earlier in the film instructs us on how to read a moment of similar thematic significance later on thus giving the film, in its totality, a typological structure allowing us to say, in a way, this is that.

The climax of the film seems easy enough to pinpoint. The climax occurs when the typological occurrence pitting a calculus of “people first” against “technology first” is once again brought to the fore. The trade-off is between The Wandering Earth Project and its subsequent re-christening after things go haywire. Competing logics are to be found in competing projects: The Wandering Earth Project versus The Helios Project. Here is MOSS referring to itself in the third person:

Only 42 seconds after activating Emergency Protocol No. 3, MOSS had already deduced out all possible outcomes. UEG was informed but still chose to perform this rescue mission, which was predetermined to be futile. The evacuation of [the] space station indicated that the rescue mission has failed. After three hours, Earth will breach Jupiter’s Roche limit and begin the inevitable disintegration process … The Wandering Earth Project has failed. Earth Navigation Project renamed Helios Project.

At approximately 74 min into the film, we discover that pretty much the entire narrative run thus far was a ruse, though Liu Peiqiang earlier suspected as much. Approximately 56 min into the film he says flat out that “low consumption mode is ruse” and knows fully that MOSS has defected.

Hindsight proves him correct, which means watching Emergency Protocol No. 3 unfold before us was itself a ruse, which means that we were watching minutes 56 through 74 of the film in vain. MOSS had already deduced all possible outcomes but never bothered to tell us. And if the deaths leading up to the desecration of Hangzhou’s Lighter Core were indeed all in vain, then in a way, so too was all the discussion above of moral calculi. That is, paragraphs 24 through 37 of this essay were also a ruse.

However, reading the film metaphorically at the very least makes those minutes (and paragraphs) extremely valuable as they instruct us on how to read what I believe is the movie’s climax, which is Liu Peiqiang’s fateful decision to kamikaze the International Space Station including its vast store not only of human, but earthly treasures. Liu takes it upon himself to immolate a veritable Noah’s ark. In its earlier global broadcast, MOSS presents a compelling case against such transgression:

In order to sustain human civilization, MOSS will initiate the Helios Project. 300,000 human embryos are stored on the Navigation Platform Space Station, along with 100 million seeds of basic crops, DNA maps of all known animals and plant species, and digital libraries of all human civilizations to ensure the successful revival of [the] new hosted planet. You are all heroes of the Earth. We will remember to honor you. We will shoulder your aspirations and send it to our new home.

Despite the platitudes, MOSS has divested itself of the human population and the Earth altogether absolving itself of a veritable “white man's burden,” hence expressing in the fullest possible measure a Malthusian misanthropic Western fantasy of rapidly depopulating the planet. Furthermore, MOSS’s actions are ratified (in French, mind you) by a human voice at the other end of Liu’s final plea to save the planet. After a courageous, dangerous, and epic last-ditch effort to propel planet Earth away from Jupiter’s gravitational spike (by concentrating an immense energy beam from Sulawesi 03 Torque Engine directly into Jupiter’s hydrogen “eye”) fails, Liu proposes to drive the International Space Station, including 300,000 tons of its on-site fuel reserves, directly into the beam, increasing its range to the required 5000 kilometers. Once again and this time with increased urgency, the specter of possible payoffs and outcomes is raised. MOSS has made his case above and the UEG’s rationale follows suit:

Lieutenant Colonel Liu Peiqiang. The goal of the Wandering Earth Project is to maximize the survival of mankind. The Helios Project ensures the continuity of human civilization.

Yet Liu slices through the binding logic with six little words:

A civilization without people is meaningless.⁹

A calculus of people first could not be clearer. Yet how did we get ourselves in a position where such a possible outcome was put in serious jeopardy in the first place? Liu’s words do in effect what Zhou Qian’s bullets did earlier. They instantly smash the spell of technology fetishism in a manner that strikes us (and here I mean Westerners) as odd or incomprehensible but correct nonetheless. We are, at these words, struck dumbfounded.

Yet note the film’s earlier penultimate climax which, in a way, ensures this film not be read as traditional allegorical fare of heroic individual making Christ-like sacrifice for all humanity. Rather, the more urgent and pressing issue is, in a sense, to get all of humanity, who have now abandoned all hope, to return to make one last collective stab at planetary survival. Duoduo’s plea to humanity can be read here in metaphorical relation to her plea against the wilderness earlier. Both are a search for hope within a universe that has turned insurmountably and oppressively bleak.

Yesterday my teacher asked us, “What is hope?” In the past, I never believed in hope. But now I do. I believe that in our time, hope is precious like a diamond. Hope. Hope is the only way to guide us home. Please come back and fight together! Light up Jupiter! Save our Earth!

The penultimate climax of the film occurs when all transport vehicles return to Sulawesi against all odds, one by individual one. The odds are not against the mission succeeding but against humanity even making the collective attempt. That a single girl’s plea across the airwaves is alone enough to cut through the mass of competing individual wills to move the planet away from its assured doom is the most far-fetched scenario of the film. That it actually succeeds is arguably the film’s true climax, itself a beam of optimism blaring through a desolate cosmos. What this film reveals is that to us in the West, technology fetishism has snuffed out optimism. Optimism is itself far-fetched. How can we bear it?

In conclusion, let me turn now to the allegorical and to reiterate my last point: China’s right to take the lead not in sacrificing itself for the greater good, but in mobilizing the energy of the oppressed people of the world against the cold hard Western calculi that have brought the planet to the brink of collapse. The film subtly suggests that Western voices are largely to be silenced or ignored; the planet must find ways and means to divorce itself not from the watchful eye of Western technology per se but from the logics which either breed it or are bred by it in order to navigate the planet to newer and better hopes.

Once again, the metaphor the film presents and renders visible is this: the effort required to decolonize human minds is as gargantuan as that necessary to drive the planet to inhabit another solar system. To do one is to do the other. Yet the film also presents this outcome as possible, which to me suggests that the changes in our social relations necessary to enact the mass decolonization of humanity is altogether possible even if the steps to such liberation (read narrative, teleological, or even allegorical understanding) remain beyond our grasp. This film, though allegorical in some respects, is clearly not allegory. The film attempts instead to reframe our mental conceptions and understanding of our social relations to one another, a necessary step before something like the impending planetary disaster to come can be avoided. We must face the possible reorganizing or reorienting of our social relations to one another on this Earth.

Mao managed to get the Chinese organized because they managed to work out organizing principles within what I term a Maoist discourse … . One of these organizing principles was the structure and activities of grassroots organizations of the CCP. In every work unit, be it a department of human resources or a factory floor, there was a CCP party branch, and in every branch there was a leading group composed of the core members of the CCP in the work unit … . This was called “organization life” … .

That organizational principle now seems to have collapsed. Professor Kong Qingdong of Peking University, a self-claimed Maoist, complained that there was no CCP party organization anymore … . Kong complained that the CCP now looked like an underground organization because it was afraid of being seen for what it truly was. (Emphasis added, Gao 2018, 94–95).

Above Mobo Gao is emphasizing that China is hardly monolithic yet was able to achieve socialist goals based on a simple organizing principle. I will say that the above reflects a guiding ethic of people first; yet if “organization life” or the “organizational principle” immediately connotes images of work camps or gulags, I believe what is in fact happening (aside from eliding the possibility of changing our actual lived social relations with one another) is an immediate reach to a failed logic of imperialism in face of dread — a logic which puts individuals rather than people first, usually summed up under the obfuscatory rhetoric of “human rights.”

[I]n tune with the international intellectual and political climate, the ideology of … individual human rights take[s] priority over national sovereign rights. The argument, which appears convincing in abstract terms, is that all human beings have basic rights in common, which should be protected by all governments. If and when governments abuse any of those basic rights the international community, meaning those countries that hold the moral high ground of human rights, have the right to intervene, including military attack and occupation of one country by another. (Gao 2018, 78)

Even a cursory glance at any major English speaking newspaper’s headlines about China will reveal hysterics over “human rights” violations. Yet this is done largely to counter a growing sense of human solidarity within China (often taken to be a dangerous form of “nationalism”) which may or may not extend elsewhere. Gao (2018, 12) also notes that

Chinese nationalism, especially Chinese nationalism in the Mao era … is not ethnic or racial chauvinism, but a political project to counter the existing world order of Western dominance. It is not nationalism per se but political and economic independence.

The type which naturally threatens those with privileged positions within the current global and economic order. If any nation, let alone China, initiates any type of call for human solidarity, how likely are we, or the world, to listen? Duoduo’s beleaguered pleas are equal parts hopeful and hopeless (Figures 3 and 4).

Figure 3. The effort required to decolonize human minds is as gargantuan as that necessary to drive the planet to inhabit another solar system.

Figure 4. In a fictionalized UN, China asserts its right to lead the P5.

Yet a contradiction remains. Technology fetishism is being employed to tell a story about altering the nature of our lived social relations to one-another, but it remains to be seen if said social transformation can then afford us the technological advances we require to survive. Quite easy to argue in fact that The Wandering Earth, via the use and rendering of a genre and narrative that relies so explicitly on the fetishization of technology, has succumbed to the very Western fantasies of growth and advancement it seeks to slay. Moreover, the crude juxtaposition of idealized social relations against technological advancement simply fetishizes the former in relation to the latter with no real-world correlate attesting to the efficacy of such a juxtaposition. Indeed, forcing an idealized social moment to its crisis carries the potential for severe revolutionary disaster, as past social experiments in China have shown, whereas technology actually can get us out of the debacles we find ourselves in while respecting individual rights to boot.

Perhaps. But it is not too much to say that the logic of valuing individual (read “human”) rights over and above any national sovereign is itself the logic that has led to this most harrowing of circumstances: planetary rather than national collapse.¹⁰ Taken allegorically, the death of the sun equals something like global warming, the teleological endgame of global capitalism; taken metaphorically, the sun’s death equals the death of colonization, so the wandering Earth is here one lost or wandering precisely because no longer colonized.¹¹

The Earth, so easily disposable in this film by the curator of human civilizational achievement (i.e. MOSS, who, incidentally, speaks at select times in English, the predominant language of colonization), is “put-for” the colonized, the sun its imperial colonizer. Without the sun to guide their orbit, the colonized instead put their faith in the Navigational Platform International Space Station, yet by film’s end are cut loose from even its guidance. Nathaniel Isaacson (2017, 37) notes

In his reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Said writes, “As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them” … . The imperial imagination proved to be such a compelling notion that many authors were not able to conceive of the absence of empire, despite growing awareness of its abuses.

The image of a wandering Earth is not simply a stretch of the imperial imagination but its complete overhaul. We are given full-view not of freedom being granted or received, but of the natives taking it in all its maimed and desecrated glory. MOSS, originally constructed to “provide warnings, navigation, and communications for Earth” has been vanquished once and for all; the darker people of the world have been liberated, left to wander the universe and face their uncertain fate alone in solidarity.

Special terms

Zhongguo xin 中国心

Ye ye bu zai. Women de jia zai nali? 爷爷不在。我们的家在哪里？

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Lv Huan Huan for taking me to see this film and also Chen Beile for alerting me to several very useful sources. Lastly, I’d like to thank two anonymous reviewers for very helpful and encouraging comments.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amir Khan

Amir Khan is Xinghai Associate Professor of English in the School of Foreign Languages at Dalian Maritime University. His books include Shakespeare in Hindsight (2016) and Comedies of Nihilism (2017). He is managing editor of Conversations: The Journal of Cavellian Studies.

Notes

1 Elsewhere he calls them “moments” and says there are seven (Harvey 2009).

2 David S. Roh notes that the “techno-Orientalist gaze” (Roh, Huang, and Niu 2015, 7) which affirms Western centrality against an Asiatic other however technologically advanced, has now shifted definitively to China from Japan: “In the twenty-first century, the perceived economic threat of Japan and its automobiles has given way to China. Despite the fact that China does not have a particularly strong reputation as a high-tech nation, techno-Orientalism’s robust flexibility allows for seamless transplantation to another national site” (Roh, Huang, and Niu 2015, 11).

3 Frant Gwo’s second theatrical release, My Old Classmate (2014), despite clumsily rehashing boy-meets-girl motifs, was nonetheless a box-office hit.

4 Translated as such via the English supers which appear in the Netflix released version — a translation which does not appear in the Chinese theatrical release (which carries both English and Chinese subtitles). Throughout I have opted to use the translation given on the Chinese print rather than the North American one (i.e. Netflix) unless otherwise indicated. I have corrected obvious typos and infelicities.

5 Seconds earlier, we see a man making a purchase at a stall via the barcode on his thermal suit. An onscreen message reads “Payment successful.” He asks: “Where is my ordered item?” and a vendor says, “It’s here.” But we know not what the man has ordered nor what measure of value is stored via the barcode on the man’s suit. Both sides may have here engaged in an electronic exchange of equivalents, essentially a barter.

6 See Jameson (2003, 66).

7 At this point, that Han Ziang is not easily and quickly pulled up before the Lighter Core, which is now many more floors below Han Ziang, truly betrays an inverse of the calculus mentioned earlier: with only an old man in the elevator shaft, it is now most certainly technology first, a particularly callous order given by Wang Lei.

8 Some of the facile Western interpretations of Chinese narratives are so ridiculously one-sided and predictable as to warrant being labeled “cheap propaganda criticism” as opposed to “allegorical criticism.” See Jiaying Fan, The New Yorker, 24 June 2019.

9 Setting aside the gendered translation which appears in the Chinese print (“A civilization without men is meaningless”), I don’t much care for the one appearing in the Netflix version either: “A civilization without lives is meaningless.” The original Chinese is Meiyou ren de wenming, haowu yiyi (没有人的文明， 毫无意义). The translation here (of a single word, ren) is my own.

10 Patrick Dineen puts it nicely: “Today we are accustomed to arguing that we should follow the science in an issue such as climate change, ignoring that our crisis is the result of long-standing triumphs of science and technology in which ‘following science’ was tantamount to civilizational progress” (Dineen 2018, 14–15).

11 MOSS’s defection from a project designed to save human lives should be read against Fanon’s warning that imperialism would rather sacrifice human populations than allow them to take the lead in their own affairs. “In other words, the colonial power says: ‘If you want independence, take it and suffer the consequences.’ The nationalist leaders then are left with no other choice but to turn to their people and ask them to make a gigantic effort. These famished individuals are required to undergo a regime of austerity, these atrophied muscles are required to work out of all proportion” (Fanon 1963, 54). I believe The Wandering Earth captures this sentiment as well. One reason China may be coy in its attempt to decolonize not only itself but the planet is because such vituperative backlash awaits. Many amongst the so-called “civilized” West would rather humanity suffer the consequences than see China lead it to better hopes.